Scripture speaks to politics: a response to Cale Horne

I think I like Cale Horne. I certainly like what I take to be his point in “How Scripture Speaks to Politics” in the May 2014 edition of Ordained Servant: namely, that Christians must beware a tendency, found on both the right and left, to read justifications for public policy positions into the Bible. Unfortunately, the exegetical argument he uses to buttress this wise advice demonstrates both poor logic and (perhaps unwitting?) ignorance of our confessional standards.

That exegetical argument has to do with the proper interpretation of the Eighth  and Tenth Commandments, but Horne falls into the logical fallacy of the excluded middle earlier when he writes, “If we accept that the Bible in its entirety is an unfolding of the story of redemption, we are unlikely… to go looking in the Bible for policy prescriptions that simply are not there” (emphasis added). He does not explore, and hence by implication excludes, the possibility that we who accept that the Bible in its entirety is an unfolding of the story of redemption may  go looking in said Bible for policy prescriptions and may even, on occasion, find them.

This brings us to his argument that the Eighth and Tenth Commandments do not presuppose the God-ordained existence of private property and a consequent duty of the civil magistrate to protect individuals’ right to hold it. Remarkably, he does not demonstrate that the conclusion with which he disagrees is founded on bad exegesis, but argues it is ruled out because of the previous exclusion of the middle: “Based on our assumptions – that the Bible in all its parts is revealing to us God’s plan of salvation for his people, and that this revelation is organic and unfolding – we must conclude that these uses of Exodus 20… are wide of the mark.” Instead, he posits that Adam in his innocence was called to steward all things as possessions of God, and so “[t]he Eighth and Tenth Commandments are required because, by the entrance of sin, we no longer regard property entrusted to us as articles of our stewardship that are not his own.”

Frankly, I find this, especially in the context of Horne’s exegesis of Acts 4, a helpful redemptive-historical insight. However, said insight fails to rule out the exegetical conclusion that the Eighth and Tenth Commandments presuppose a right to private property. Without further demonstration to that effect, this assertion on Horne’s part is another example of the fallacy of the excluded middle: here, the assumption that one application necessarily excludes all other applications. In this case, both applications could be true.

Further, our Larger Catechism speaks in support only of the application which Horne believes excluded, that the Eighth Commandment (at least) requires a right to private property. Larger Catechism 142 speaks of “what belongs to” our neighbor, and it and 143 assume a civil legal apparatus to enforce property rights (“justice in contracts and commerce…; restitution of goods unlawfully detained from the right owners thereof; … avoiding unnecessary lawsuits…; and an endeavor, by all just and lawful means, to procure, preserve, and further the wealth and outward estate of others, as well as our own”). Horne appears not to have thought through the implications of his argument for our confessional standards.

I respond at this late date (at the time of this writing, in mid-October to an essay which appeared in May) not because I want to employ the Bible to promote a right- or left-wing political agenda (which I consider in poor taste, not to mention a subversion of the Gospel). Rather, I write because Horne falls into errors which are increasingly common in the OPC, including (and perhaps especially) among her ecclesiastical officers. The fallacy of the excluded middle can be found in some of our theological controversies, such as pitting a redemptive-historical hermeneutic against grammatical-historical exegesis or Genesis 1-2 as covenant against chronological history. Some of our other theological controversies, it seems to me, could be forestalled by reflection upon what we have already purported to believe in our doctrinal standards. (I have in mind, for example, a failed overture to the General Assembly some years ago to form a study committee on hermeneutics. The OPC’s hermeneutic is stated plainly in WCF 1.9: “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture [which is not manifold, but one], it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.”)

As I said earlier, I like Cale Horne, and with him I look askance at efforts on the political right and left to claim the Scriptures support their predetermined positions; still, that does not change the fact our Catechisms teach us that the moral and civil law have implications for public policy. In other words, Scripture speaks to politics, and our duty as Church officers is to think reasonably and confessionally about what the Bible says.